My First Day Working Full-Time for Skribit

I’m sorry to disappoint – this post has nothing to do with the Apple keynote at Macworld 2009, iTunes going completely DRM-free, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro with an 8 hour battery life, or a myriad of CES coverage. Instead, this post is about my first day of full-time work at Skribit, a startup helping bloggers cure writer’s block (among other things) that I have been working on for the last year alongside Co-Founder Calvin Yu (whose full-time gig was featured on AJC.com today).

So what was my day like? For one, I’d say it was more productive than I have ever been with working on Skribit before. The explanation for that is simple. Previously I only had scattered patches of time to devote to Skribit. Having one massive block of time devoted to Skribit with nothing else in my mind nagging me was a relief and let me concentrate like no other. Of course, some coding-friendly ETN.fm trance iTunes radio in the background was welcomed.

Oh and this might have had something to do with that productivity:
I’m a caffiend.

I could not have gotten the ridiculously early 8am (compared to my noon classes in college) start without this new coffee maker. I set it all up the night before, turned on the alarm and it was already brewing coffee when I woke up.

I did notice that I should some breaks from time to time. When I’m working at home by myself there are absolutely no distractions that would get me up and walking around the office like at a typical job. Even with a good chair my back started to hurt after 3 hours in the same position. Fortunately my fridge was empty so lunch was a good 1/2-mile walk to a deli.

Work environment as of 9:20am, overcast outside explains low light.

Unlike some corporate jobs where you might be looking for something to do (or not), there was no shortage of work to be done on my first day. I started off by digging into a bug that a Skribit user reported and then talking with him further as I tried to reproduce it. After that, I moved on to working (and continue to) on a page to help people customize the sidebar widget with their own CSS instead of our customizer. Sometime in between those two I committed a change to a tool in our admin panel that would save time when looking up stuff. Admittedly, I spent a good 30 minutes skimming a rails book and Googling to find out how to do something in Rails and then figured out that the solution was right in front me.

However, not everything I do will be coding-related (although I do enjoy it – nothing feels more like progress than git push origin). More on that when it actually happens.

Over the next few weeks I will find a work schedule that fits me. At the moment starting the day early seems to work as that’s when Calvin and Lance are also at work and most accessible (via Campfire and email) should I need to contact them or vice versa. However, college has bred me as a night owl and I regularly stayed up past 3am for the last 4 years, so we will see if I can keep that under control. I have gotten many opinions on work schedules from people that work from home. One said “9:30-11 work/coffee, 11:30-3 work/eat, 3-4 gym, 5-8 work, 8-11 eat/life, 11-1 work” while Kyle said something along the lines of “wake up at noon and work for a couple of hours or whatever.”

Overall, I’m glad that my first day of full-time work did not include a long commute, orientation meetings, listening to HR people rant, moving into a cubicle, TPS reports, company-issued PCs or anything of that ilk.

What’s your full-time job and what’s it like?

Tagged as: Internet, Life, Skribit, Software, Startup, Web Dev